Description

“In his late portraits, especially, Eakins sought the underlying structure and substance of the head and body and pulled no punches when it came to telling the truth about the individual who posed before him.” [1] Thomas Eakins claimed his right as an artist to read and represent the truth of what he saw before him, or what he believed the truth to be, even when it was at odds with another’s concept of the subject.

Asbury Wright Lee (1841-1927) of Clearfield, Pennsylvania, was described in his obituary notice in the Clearfield Progress as “one of the best known men in Central Pennsylvania”, and one who “sponsored and gave largely of his time, energy and money to every movement looking toward the advancement of our town, its institutions and its people.” [2] As a member of the Arts Club of Philadelphia, Lee would have been familiar with Eakins’s work.

In a typewritten letter from Clearfield dated January 29, 1905, A. W. Lee wrote to Eakins: “My dear Sir: I am sorry that I have been unable to give you a sitting. Am now going South and will return by your City in March, when I hope to be able to give you some time. Very sincerely yours, A. W. Lee” Apparently Lee was able to pose for Eakins but the end result would not satisfy the sitter. In a handwritten letter dated September 19, 1905 sent from Tyrone, Pennsylvania, Lee again wrote Eakins: “Dear Sir: You will receive the Painting back from Washington addressed Mary E. Lee, 1729 Mt. V. I may make a suggestion when I am down soon. While not accepted by me I send you a cheque for $200 anyway. In a general way my daughter liked it. Very truly yours, A. W. Lee” [3]

Was Lee correct in his assessment of the painting, or was his daughter? Eakins’s historians frequently cite this particular portrait as an instance of a sitter rejecting and returning their portrait to Eakins. Paradoxically, several art historians have in effect agreed with Lee in assessing this as an unsuccessful portrait even while they excuse Eakins and implicitly blame Lee (and other sitters) for not appreciating Eakins’s genius. William Innes Homer has written, “And the Gest and Lee portraits are among his least successful works, especially the latter. Both are wooden in their poses, and their faces have that detached, abstracted look that mars more than a few of Eakins’s later portraits. Eakins was much more comfortable painting people he knew.” [4] For art historian Darrel Sewell, it was that Lee, or any other unhappy sitter, was missing the point. “. . . Eakins’s objective observation was of the person without the intervention of their conception of their own personality. When all of these devices were applied to a sitter whom Eakins apparently found unsympathetic, the result could become devastating. A. W. Lee commissioned and paid for his portrait, but refused to accept it.” [5]

For some, the residual power of Lee’s portrait as a psychological study has made the work’s failure as an accurate likeness of the sitter increasingly irrelevant. “A more immediately impressive work is the portrait of A. W. Lee (1905), a civilized barbarian who refused to accept his portrait, but paid Eakins for it and returned it to him. Eakins’s view of him contains that kind of response. His portrait may appear one of Eakins’s harshest revelations of character, omitting nothing in its delineation of the stiff and the inhuman, from the rigidity of the man’s pose to the marmoreal quality of his long face with its hard gray-blue eyes. Yet inhumanity is not all one discovers in the man, for what had frozen in him, after all, was a superior energy. If he could not like what Eakins found in him others may be struck by the sheer power of vision in this intense work, and by something that competes with that stiff probity, that angry response to life. Lee’s eyes are not simply hard; they hint at the beginnings of self-recognition, the discovery that life had been lost in the pursuit of something else. This work belongs to moral vision, but it communicates its impression with a richness that has its sources in the response to an era and in the ability to probe the psychology of a most unlikely subject.” [6]

According to art historian Darrel Sewell, Eakins learned his technique from a brief study with the French portraitist Léon Bonnat near the end of his studies in Paris. These practices included placing sitters in surroundings appropriate to their professions and/or accomplishments, intense lighting of the subject against a dark, indeterminate background, and being realistic in the depiction of clothing worn, to depict wrinkles and folds suggestive of wear. [7] Unlike Bonnat, Eakins tended to place his sitter back from the picture plane, gazing outwardly past and not at all engaged with the viewer. Several of these techniques are employed by Eakins in A. W. Lee’s portrait. In this half-length portrait, Mr. Lee is seated in a wooden chair, of which only a few spindles and the armrests are visible. A strong light source from the left of the composition catches the edge of his high collar in a flashing gleam of white. In this nearly monochromatic painting, the effect of Lee’s pale bright blue eyes, encircled in reddish tones, is startling. In a contemporary black-and-white studio photograph by Bachrach [8], Lee is shown in a seated pose and dress nearly identical to this painting, yet the overall impression upon the viewer is vastly different. Instead of a loosely clenched right and open left hand resting on the chair arms, in the photograph, Lee’s firm fists suggest authority. In the painting, Lee’s overcoat is buttoned up and strained over his belly, whereas in the studio photograph his coat is left unbuttoned, revealing a buttoned vest and hint of a watch fob, imparting a much more relaxed and confident demeanor. Whereas, in the photograph, Lee’s coiffure appears as distinguished silver gray, in the painting his locks are limp, dark and graying. In the photograph, Lee directly regards the viewer but, in Eakins’s image, his gaze looks past us and to an indeterminate distance. The Bachrach photograph seems an appropriate illustration of Lee’s character as suggested by his obituary, while Eakins’s portrait of him seems completely dismissive of any such goal. The greatest attention is placed on the musculature of the face and the hands that could belong to any older man. By subverting the functionality of his portraiture in favor of his own aesthetic vision, influenced by life experience but subjectively presented, the claim for Eakins as the precursor to American Modernism in the twentieth century seems justified. “The singers, musicians, educators, lawyers, and churchmen in Eakins’s portraits are scarred, introspective individuals, precarious survivors of an arduous age, people stripped of innocence. Their life-battered faces, lined with anxiety and frozen in thought, expressed both Eakins’s own brooding introspection and sense of estrangement as well as the ravaging impact of time and stress upon sensitive minds. The thought-burdened intensity evident in his diverse portrait gallery encourages viewers to identify with the sitters’ emotional states, to share their existential predicament and fragility.” [9]

It is not clear whether Eakins did any preparatory work for this portrait, although there is every reason to think he did. It is also not known how many sittings Lee might have been able to give Eakins, although the dates of his letters to Eakins suggest a period of no more than six months at the most to complete the work. Recent scholarship has revealed how much Eakins used photography, as well as extensive drawing and perspective studies, in preparing for his paintings. His use of photography did not save him time but did help him impart a seeming authenticity and detachment to his compositions. He would directly project his photographs on his canvas, or he would use the traditional method of drawing a grid on a photograph for the purpose of scaling up the image to a canvas. [10] The Bachrach photograph was given to Reynolda House Museum of American Art by a descendant of the sitter and is undated, so it is not clear if Eakins ever saw it, let alone used it or another photograph for reference.

The painting, once returned, remained in Eakins’s home and as part of the estate was handled by Babcock Galleries. It was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Fleishman in 1953 and later acquired by Kennedy Galleries in 1966. The painting was given by Nancy Susan Reynolds and Barbara B. Millhouse to Reynolda House Museum of American Art in early 1969, in advance of the revival of interest by critics and collectors of art by Thomas Eakins in the 1970s.

Notes:
[1] Homer, William I. Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991, pp. 223-4.
[2] “Clearfield loses most successful business man,” Clearfield Progress November 22, 1927. Copy of obituary from the object file in Reynolda House Museum of American Art.
[3] Copy of letters are in the Reynolda House file
[4] Homer, William I. Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art, p. 230.
[5] Sewell, Darrel. Thomas Eakins: Artist of Philadelphia, p.105.
[6] Schendler, Sylvan. Eakins, pp., 181, 183.
[7] Sewell, Darrel. Thomas Eakins: Artist of Philadelphia, p.105.
[8] Bachrach Photography was founded in 1868 in Baltimore by David Bachrach and, over the years, made a name for its “authorative portraits of America’s leadership class.” By 1929, there were forty-eight Bachrach studios across the country. As of 2010, this was still a family-run business with were four remaining studios in Boston, Alexandria (VA), New York, and Philadelphia. Source: Schudel, Matt. “Fabian Bachrach, 92, dies: Photographed iconic portraits of presidents,” The Washington Post, Sunday, March 7, 2010.
[9] Shi, David, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture 1850-1920, p. 146.
[10] For more information about Eakins’s use of photography, see Mark Tucker and Nica Gutman’s “Photographs and the Making of Paintings,” Thomas Eakins Exh. cat. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001, pp. 225-238.

Artist Bio

“I was born in Philadelphia July 15, 1844. I had many instructors, the principal ones Gérôme, Dumont (sculptor), Bonnat. I taught in the [Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts] from the opening of the schools until I was turned out, a period much longer than I should have permitted myself to remain there. My honors are misunderstanding, persecution, & neglect, enhanced because unsought.” [1]

Personally controversial during his lifetime and today, Thomas Eakins’s place in American art history as one of the greatest artists of the nineteenth century, along with his contemporary Winslow Homer, remains secure, through such aesthetic achievements in such works as The Champion Single Sculls (1871), The Gross Clinic (1875), The Concert Singer (1890-92), The Agnew Clinic (1889), and The Thinker (Portrait of Louis N. Kenton) (1900). Like Homer, Eakins was not part of a school and had no direct followers, but his controversial career and singularly focused aesthetic production are seen as key to the development of American art away from popular acceptance and academic training towards an emphasis on the genius of the individual, quintessentially American artist. Eakins’s lifelong commitment to straightforward realism, anatomy, linear perspective, mathematics, and science set him apart as a profound and highly original artist, one of the greatest of all American painters.

Positive critical reaction to Eakins’s work began to surface during the last decade of his lifetime and gained momentum over the course of the twentieth century. Critical reception reached full force in the 1970s, a time of renewed interest in American art and in Eakins in particular by collectors and historians of art. In 1923, the art historian Royal Cortissoz was dismissive of the artist: “Eakins began with a realistic point of view which completely excluded the operation of the imagination, a point of view insensitive to taste, to beauty, and his consistency, whatever its fortifying powers may have been, blinded him to all that was happening in the art of his time.” [2] But, by 1942, Roland McKinney was confident in claiming Eakins as a major influence on subsequent American painting: “Eakins was a realist and may be regarded as the father of that large school of painting loosely classified as “The American Scene.” The theme of America, so vigorously pursued by “The Eight” [Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, William J. Glackens, Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast, and later George Bellows] and, in late years, by “The Trinity,” [Thomas Benton, Grant Wood, and James (sic) Steuart Curry] of mid-Western painters, found its mainspring in Eakins.”[3] In recent years, scholars including Henry Adams, David Lubin, Whitney Davis, and others have undertaken a reassessment of Eakins’s artistic production and influence in a psycho-sociological context.

Except for three years in Paris and half-year study in Spain, and a three month trip to the Dakota Territory, Thomas Eakins lived and worked his entire life in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Benjamin Eakins, was a distinguished calligrapher and teacher of penmanship who was able to earn enough money through his profession and investments to support his children as adults, including his first-born and only son, Thomas. In the settings of his paintings, drawings, and photographs, one glimpses the physical world the artist inhabited in the interiors of his family’s house at 1729 Mount Vernon Street, at Jefferson Medical College, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and various meeting places of the Art Students’ League and boxing venues around the city. His landscapes show the venues for sport, hunting, and relaxation, which Eakins thoroughly enjoyed as participant and recorder in his paintings and photographs: rowing on the Schuykill River, shooting rails in the marshes on the family farm in Avondale, sailing on the Delaware River, ice skating, horse riding, swimming, wrestling, and boxing.

Eakins graduated from Philadelphia’s renowned Central High School in 1861, graduating with a demonstrated mastery of mechanical drawings, perspective and mathematics. Eakins did not enlist in the Union Army but instead enrolled in drawing courses at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1862. He supplemented his artistic study by enrolling in anatomy classes at Jefferson Medical College. After four years of drawing at PAFA and with the support of his father, he decided that he would travel to Paris to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts. He was accepted into the atelier of the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, of whom Eakins would speak glowingly all his life although he did not paint like his teacher. According to art historian H. Barbara Weinberg, “Eakins pioneered his generation’s pursuit of French academic study, but he revealed himself to be much more devoted to academic process . . . than to academic product. He avoided the picturesque, exotic or ideal subjects that brought fame and fortune to contemporary academics, French or American. Instead he enlisted laborious anatomical and perspective studies to portray familiar figures in traditional portrait formats or in genre settings, and to paint genre scenes with strong portrait elements.” [4]

Eakins returned to Philadelphia from Europe in 1869 and began work as an artist. He began a series of rowing pictures on the Schuykill River featuring a former Central High School classmate, of which Max Schmitt in a Single Scull is the most famous. In 1874 he was invited to teach a life-drawing class at the Philadelphia Sketch Club. He had resumed his study of anatomy at Jefferson Medical College and had begun work on what is generally considered his masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, which depicted Dr. Samuel D. Gross during a surgical procedure in the medical amphitheatre of Jefferson Medical College. Eakins intended this painting for exhibition at the famous Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876. He was extremely disappointed that this work was shown not with the American art but rather in a hospital exhibit at the exhibition, and that the subject matter was considered distasteful and offensive by critics and viewers.

That same year, Eakins began volunteering as an instructor at the newly reopened Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; by 1879, he was appointed Professor of Drawing and Painting. One of his first acts was to establish a new curriculum for PAFA. All students, male and female, were to study life drawing and anatomy, including dissections and if necessary be a life model for other students. Eakins would (and did) pose himself. This practice would later prove extremely damaging to his career.

The artist had become interested in photography in 1879, inspired by the motion study pictures of Eadward Muybridge. He met and assisted Muybridge when the photographer worked at the University of Pennsylvania in 1884-85. Eakins became an avid photographer and adapted his technique as a preparatory aid for his paintings and sculpture. He also had his students pose and take photographs of the nude from all angles and in motion for a series of photographs intended to be instructional aids in drawing the human figure.

In 1882, Eakins was appointed director of PAFA, but, just four years later, he was asked to resign after a highly publicized classroom incident when Eakins removed a loincloth from a male model in front of a class that included both men and women. Students loyal to Eakins organized the Art Students League of Philadelphia, where Eakins continued to teach until it disbanded around 1893. Eakins’s insistence upon teaching anatomy using fully nude models in his mixed and female classes led to his dismissal from the National Academy of Design in New York in 1894 and Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute in 1895, after which he stopped teaching altogether. The controversy over his teaching methods, along with deaths and divisions within his own family, would swirl around Eakins for the remainder of his life. Eakins’s former art student, Susan Hannah MacDowell, whom he married in 1884, remained loyal to her husband throughout these controversies, and, after his death in 1916, fought to restore his reputation and place his work in important museum collections. Despite the lack of understanding for Eakins in his lifetime, the artistic, athletic, and scientific men and women who posed for Eakins must have sensed something of his artistic importance. “From his earliest years, he painted almost nothing but portraits. No more than twenty-five of these portraits (the whole body of which involved over two hundred sitters and subjects) were commissioned. For all of the others, it was Eakins who took the initiative and secured the participation of his sitters. And although his portraits offended so many of his sitters that the rejected paintings now comprise large museum holdings, particularly in Philadelphia, year after year prominent people made the climb to Eakins’s fourth-floor studio, and sat through his arduous requirements for sittings.” [5]

Towards the end of his life, Eakins began to accrue the honors and awards that one might have thought he would have received earlier in his career. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in New York as an Associate in 1902, becoming a full Academician shortly afterwards. In 1905 Eakins was given the Thomas R. Proctor Prize from NAD. In 1904 and 1907, he received gold medals from the Universal Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri and Philadelphia’s American Art Society, respectively. A 1917 memorial exhibition mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by curator Bryson Burroughs began a critical re-assessment and appreciation for the realist painter.